Dishonored dev: single-player games still have an audience

Dishonored co-director Harvey Smith thinks there’s plenty of room for all kinds of games, despite the oft-expressed belief that multiplayer shooters are the only game in town.

“What people say each cycle is, ‘Fill-in-the-blank is the new thing,'” Smith told GamesIndustry.

“If you’re old enough, you remember when it was live-action video games. At another point it was MMOs. At another it was social games. At another it was multiplayer shooters.

“None of those things are bad; they’re all great. But what the reality seems to be is we keep adding types of games and finding new player groups for those. The market seems to be expanding.”

The Arkane boss said that just because a new audience opens for a new genre doesn’t mean other kinds of games won’t succeed.

It seems like our attention focuses on the new thing, but in reality, there are still plenty of people that like a particular kind of game,” he said.

“Every time someone announces the death of the single-player game, something like The Sims or BioShock Infinite comes along and does different things well. So far we haven’t capped out.

“It’s not like DOTA fans are buying DOTA and not playing Skyrim, or buying Dishonored and therefore not buying Madden. I think there’s a bunch of different audience types and we haven’t even hit the limit yet.”

Elsewhere in the article Smith discusses feedback from fans wanting or deriding multiplayer, and publisher pressure to include multiplayer features.